There’s a lot to comment on when we think about the meaning behind “Star-Crossed Lovers” and the like. Namely, we’re giving Shakespeare (whoever that really is) a boatload of credit for being, well, lucky. He orchestrated this entire mess of a play called Romeo and Juliet where these teenagers – teens, come on, dude, teens – have this random meet-up and then basically, with no prior rationale, figure out how to formulate a three-day disaster.

Let’s be clear – the story is dumb.

Romeo begins by complaining about how Juliet’s cousin (yes, cousin) dumped him. And he’s all whiny that he still has to go to the masquerade ball, for like, stature or whatever, and then he finds Juliet there. And everything changes.

But it doesn’t. Not really.

We have this idealistic view of romance as a society that somehow the love of your life is going to transform it. We see this in every single romantic comedy out there. Guy meets girl (reverse allowed if girl can attain a diversity screen award for production) and they fall in love, often with no regard for practicality or reason, and their lives are bettered.

There’s honestly nothing worse than growing up hearing all these tales of wonder and finding out they’re only for people whose stories are palatable. Palatable. Not cute, not fun, not quirky, but palatable. Easy to hear. Attainable. And that is just asking to have a whole generation become completely disgruntled with dating – forget love.

When I was in eighth grade, we had a summer reading assignment for English. The task? Choose a YA novel and give an analysis of the intiating event. (Or something about the plot, I promise.) So I, being the young woman I was, elected the John Green novel A Fault in Our Stars to be my point of contact. And man, what an analysis.

See, there’s a joke here about how a ROMANCE novel choose Julius Caesar to quote. But it wasn’t mine to make. (And might never be.)

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Cassius, urging Brutus to kill Caesar

Although the sentence seems really fun from our senate advisor Cassius, it is anything of the sort. In the scene, Cassius is urging Brutus to figure out how to covertly overtake Caesar. Cassius provides this whole mockery of a motivational rant, in fact. He begins with some corny language: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world.” He’s calling out the tyranny of Caesar. Nothing is even remotely romantic about it. The quote in this paragraph is preceded by: “Some men are masters of their fate.”

And boy was my rant (in analytical presentation) on this excellent.

I picked up this stupid book thinking there’d be some sort of allusion to Romeo and Juliet, where the star-crossed lovers thing is not only relevant, but is actually the point of the story. Instead, here was this author, who chose a lesser known monolgue to quote, and it landed before a disgruntled teenager whose Shakespeare knowledge precluded the assertion that a misquote could be a tongue-in-cheek jab at the messiness of cancer.

I hadn’t experienced what it meant to want to transform something so badly that the closest audible emotion was rage. And I barely have felt anything close to blind rage since. I’m not one of those people who is angry at the world. I’m just highly inquisitive and assertive. (I’ll blame YA novel romantic leads for those traits.)

It’s not that you can’t win all the time, it’s that even if you don’t care about winning, it’s depressing as all else to continually never win.

I wanted my random niche expertise to be understood by more than just the theatrical scholars to me at the time, which meant my theater teacher, Mrs. P. And she was a lovely mentor, truly.

I often think back to how the niche things I enjoyed studying always made their way back to helping me make a life for myself.

I’ve taken my love of performance and meshed it with an ability to help others. To take a love of stories and transform it into a love of counseling people through strife has been amazing. I cannot wait to see where else it takes me.

I only hope to be as good a friend to my collegiate friends and teammates as Mrs P was to me as a mentor in my figuring out life.

XOXO,

Dorothy B